Leaders are well positioned to respond compassionately to employees' personal suffering. Not only do leaders shape organizational norms around compassion, they often have instrumental access to resources that help alleviate suffering. But how do leaders know their compassionate efforts alleviate employee suffering as intended given the power dynamics inherent to the relationship? Drawing on communicative approaches to compassion and leadership, the present study investigates this question by examining what compassion recipients perceive as compassionate communication from leaders at work. Based on 31 qualitative interviews, recipients reported that leaders enacted compassion through the divergent messaging dimensions of sensitivity and helpfulness across three key moments in initial compassion conversations. Interestingly, these messaging dimensions are potentially related within compassion conversations between providers and recipients, highlighting the complex nature of communicating compassion at work when power dynamics are present. Our findings advance compassion theory by offering compassion recipients' perspective of workplace compassion with leaders.
A focus on the expertise of public safety professionals and academic researchers has sometimes overlooked how the public - 'regular people' - may interpret mobile public warnings. Consequently, there are significant unknowns about how to improve warning messages and, more broadly, safety education. We analyzed U.S. residents' (N = 481) open-ended responses to notional Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages, specifically asking what they would do first and why. We developed codes and conducted a content analysis of the 'what?' and 'why?' responses, then tested for associations with knowledge-related audience characteristics. The results offered nuanced perspectives on both following and not following the warning's safety advice. The results also suggest that lay knowledge may influence behavioral and attitudinal responses to WEA messages. We concluded that gaps in the organization of knowledge could be addressed by a public-safety-as-community-resilience approach. Accordingly, we offer practical recommendations for promoting community-level engagement and mutual understanding.
For public safety professionals, fostering cross-sector collaboration means finding ways for people with different domains of expertise to engage in meaningful interaction. Cross-sector collaboration requires people to come together as a collective, while simultaneously elevating local knowledge and leveraging technical knowledge. This study examines a National Weather Service integrated warning team (IWT) workshop focused on tornado readiness and other weather risks in rural Appalachia. The workshop brought together participants with two types of expertise, one focused on warning and prediction (i.e. meteorologists) and one focused on disaster response (i.e. public safety professionals, community leaders, and nonprofit leaders), in order to build relationships between organizations before severe weather hits. Ethnographic methods were leveraged for the assessment of this workshop, and multiple authors' perspectives were used for crystallization of findings. Our findings highlighted communication practices that constituted a balancing act between collective knowing, or the communicative construction of expertise, and collective not-knowing, or shared vulnerability to weather-related risks. Participants developed a sense of sharedness in purpose and goal, while also making space for individual expertise. These findings are discussed as extensions of high-resilience organizing, as well as practical recommendations for future IWT initiatives.
